Long Hours of Design

Hazel, by NoodleSoft, is a great tool for organizing and automatically  sorting files — and a great solution for sometimes forgetful employees.

At my office, we regularly purchase stock from both photos.com and istockphoto.com.

We’ve got one log-in which everyone uses, and individuals are free to download stock as they need. Of course, theses downloads land on someone’s local hard drive.

The problem with this convenience is a problem of organization.

We have a central image folder on one of our servers, and — theoretically — all the stock we download is supposed to get copied there.

Of course, this doesn’t happen.

I myself am quite guilty of this sin — and there’s plenty of stock on my local hard drive that never found it’s way to our server.

Enter Hazel, by NoodleSoft. Hazel is like OS X folder actions on steroids — except easier to deploy and without the AppleScipting.

Sorting downloaded images with Hazel

Sorting downloaded images with Hazel

Here, I’ve created  a rule that sorts images downloaded from Photos.com (based on it’s origin URL). The rule sorts the image into a “Stock” folder I have, and then copies it into the main image library (it won’t copy it it it’s a duplicate.)

Hazel Sort Options

Hazel Sort Options

With everyone in the department running these rules, all stock we download will always wind up in the central library — no effort involved.

It’s a hard-won lesson that you should never, ever, under any circumstances, ever, append “Final” to a file name.

It is an intrinsic law of the universe that the instant you put “Final” on one of your files, there WILL be a change.

After making a change, you’ll end up with “Final v2” — and that’s just all sorts of wrong.

It’s better practice to just keep version numbers, and append “PRESS” or “PRINT” or something similar.

That way, when you have changes (and you know you will), you can have “v5 PRESS” and then “v6 PRESS” and so on.

This is useful metadata and just indicates that the file is “ready to go.”

It’ll save you the cost of an aspirin.